Yeah, Obama’s been imposing a regular Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution on the country, all right. A continuation of the Bush version of TARP, a doubling down on the war in Afghanistan, a scorched earth battle to defend Bush era war criminals against their rightful punishment, new claims of plenary Executive power…. The most “progressive” thing he’s done is a national version of Romneycare (you can almost hear the insurance CEOs crying “Please don’t fling me in that briar patch!”).

Obama’s even more of a managerial centrist than he let on during the campaign. He was entirely truthful when he called himself a moderate. The real lie is the ideology of moderation itself.

Obama lied when he said, “There is not a rich America, and a poor America…. We are one nation, one people.”

No, we’re not. As Howard Zinn said, the U.S. political leadership talks as if there was some single “national interest” that “applied equally to all of us, colored or white, rich or poor, as if General Motors and Halliburton have the same interests as the rest of us, as if George Bush has the same interest as the young man or woman he sends to war.” But it’s a lie…

…The idea that Obama is “hard-Left” is utterly laughable. There is no Left in mainstream American politics. Nancy Pelosi’s husband is an investment banker. Joe Biden was the Senator from MBNA, and now he’s the Vice President from the MPAA.

The genuine Left was virtually destroyed, as a major political force, during Woodrow Wilson’s War Hysteria and Red Scare. Since then, popular anger has been pretty effectively distorted and channeled by the myth of America as a “middle class country” with a common “national interest.”

Interesting article on President Bush II (aka President Alfred E. Neuman I) from Russia Today. Vincent Bugliosi has the right idea on what to do with this asshole: “If Bush, in fact, intentionally misled this nation into war, what is the proper punishment for him? Since many Americans routinely want criminal defendants to be executed for murdering only one person, if we weren’t speaking of the president of the United States as the defendant here, to discuss anything less than the death penalty for someone responsible for over 100,000 deaths would on its face seem ludicrous.”

RT interviewed the author of a book called “Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years” for comments on what the former president of the United States reveals in his memoirs. In particular, Bush says he personally approved the interrogation technique of “water boarding” of terror suspects and says it helped prevent terrorist attacks.

Former CIA officer Ray McGovern says no such methods can ever be justified.

“Torture is one of those techniques, one of those things that is always intrinsically wrong – just like slavery, or like rape, or genocide,” he told RT. “In the entire civilized world we recognized that after World War II – that’s why we have the international agreements, the convention against torture, domestic violence and so forth.”

“Waterboarding is universally recognized – everywhere but the White House – as torture,”McGovern stated.

Baker, in turn, pointed out that Bush planned the invasion of Iraq even before he became president.

“I actually had an opportunity to interview a man who was in direct contact with George W. Bush when he was running for president of the United States,”Baker claimed. “I describe the conversation. They were working on a book in 1999 and this man asked Bush what he intended to do in office because he needed to put something into the book, and Bush actually told him that one thing on his mind was that he hoped to invade Iraq. This was quite astonishing to this man, and so he asked why he wanted to do that. And Bush said, ‘I’ve become convinced that you really can’t have a successful presidency unless you are seen as a commander in chief. You need a small successful war to get your ratings up and in order to pass your agenda.”

This is pretty good. It’s a much more objective, analytical, and intelligently written examination of the Alternative Right than what is typical among most “ant-fascist” types. Some highlights with my comments:

Paleoconservatives don’t have a mass following or much in the way of institutional power these days, but they do have a fairly lively intellectual scene. The defenders of Western civilization offer a number of competently written, well-produced journals, websites, and blogs, and a whole cohort of younger writers along with older, more established figures. Some of what they have to say is the same old predictable poison, but there is also some genuine political ferment going on, with ideas from other sources (tribalism and national anarchism, the European New Right, black conservatism, even the Left) contributing to comradely debate.

In some ways, I think the Alternative Right is something new and a step above old-fashioned paleoconservatism. It brings a lot of residual paleo influences with it, but its evolved past paleoconservatism in some ways as well. Its adherents tend to be younger, less religious, less attached to more standard forms of conservatism, and more radical in their thinking than the paleocons of the 1980s and 1990s or even more recently. “Post-paleo” is a term I’ve seen thrown around to describe the Alternative Right. Even today, I’ve noticed something of a generation gap among younger and older adherents of the Alternative Right.

Keith Preston’s role as an AltRight contributing editor is significant in itself. A former Love and Rage member who still calls himself an anarchist, Preston advocates a revolutionary alliance of rightist and leftist libertarians against the U.S. empire and writes prolifically through his blog, Attack the System, and other rightist outlets such as Taki’s Magazine.

This is an accurate description of myself except that I never actually belonged to the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation. I was at their founding conference in Chicago in 1989, and the idea at the time was for Love and Rage to simply be a publication for North American leftist-anarchists, not an actual political organization. The organization didn’t emerge until a few years later. I actually broke with that project after the conference, believing that it was being dominated by authoritarian leftists motivated by the usual paradigm of left-wing identity politics and who had a very limited understanding of or commitment to the anarchist position. I actually became somewhat notorious in the North American anarchist milieu as a “Love and Rage”-basher for a brief time around 1990. Eventually, that group split up when their “leader” decided to turn the organization into a Marxist-Leninist sect, so apparently my criticisms were well-founded.

And as this brief sampling of writings from AlternativeRight.com shows, some paleocons are also listening to other movements and rethinking old ideas. The fact that many AltRightcontributors are involved in a range of other publications and political initiatives indicates that this is not an isolated development. To varying degrees, this same political ferment can be seen on other paleocon websites such as Taki’s Magazineand The Occidental Quarterly. More broadly, a dynamic interplay between paleocon and revolutionary forms of white nationalism can be seen on sites such as Attack the System,Occidental Dissent and American Third Position.

Attack the System is Anarchist in its ideological orientation, and not white nationalist. Occidental Dissent and American Third Position are explicitly white nationalist in nature. What sets Attack the System apart from other anarchist tendencies is its rejection of both the Old Left classical socialist dichotomy pitting proletarians against bourgeoisie or the New Left dichotomy pitting traditional outgroups against traditional WASP society. Instead, Attack the System holds to the radically anti-statist outlook of traditional anarchism within the context of a contemporary political and cultural analysis similar to what James Kalb uses to describe the Alternative Right: “In America today, Catholic trads, constitutionalists, libertarians, and HBD fans all count as conservative, I suppose because they all object to the omnicompetent PC managerial state and take a more laissez faire and less radically egalitarian approach to a lot of issues.”

Attack the System identifies the managerial state, its totalitarian humanist legitimating ideology, its left-wing of the plutocracy, rising upper middle class, and New Class socio-economic orientation, and, in the case of the United States, the American empire and wider body of international institutions that are a manifestation of the empire as the primary enemy, rather than simply “the bourgeoisie” as historically understood or the usual laundry list of Isms, Archies, and Phobia attacked by the modern Left. This obviously puts us in the same camp as much of the Alternative Right on a good number of issues and, by extension, we overlap with much of ordinary paleoconservatism, right-wing populism, and even white nationalism as well. But that’s not the whole story. We also overlap considerably with the “alternative left” to the degree that there is one, and many of the previously identified ten core demographics involve populations, ideas, or issues way outside of any kind of right-wing paradigm. Properly understood, Anarchist class theory is populist rather than Marxist in nature, meaning that Anarchism conceives of political struggle in terms of “The People vs The State” (and institutional entities or class groupings allied with the state) rather than mere employers of wage labor or owners of means of production. Historically, Anarchists have been everything from dissident aristocrats or even nobility (like Kropotkin) to peasants or common criminals. In a contemporary American society, Anarchists and their allies and/or constituents could theoretically include both white nationalists concerned about escalating institutional discrimination against whites or high crime rates in minority communities, and black nationalists concerned about economic devastation inflicted on black communities by state and corporate policies, police murder and brutality inflicted on blacks, or the high rate of imprisonment of blacks in the prison-industrial complex. The constituents for Anarchism could include religious conservatives who wish to simply practice their religion within the context of their homes, businesses, churches, private schools, or alternative media, without being bothered by the dictates of PC or the intrusions of the Nanny State, and it could also include libertines who wish to set up brothels and opium dens without being subject to repression under prohibition laws. All of these perspectives are compatible with the Anarchist paradigm. Those who find this baffling are simply stuck in old ways of thinking.

Radley Balko is one of the very best critics of the American police state of anyone who is relatively mainstream. Here he discusses what he considers to be the baffling situation of liberal media support for the drug war and opposition to marijuana legalization. His answer is that the media must not be that liberal after all.

It’s telling that the loudest voices opposing pot legalization are coming from the mainstream media, politicians, and law enforcement. The three have a lot in common. Indeed, the Prop. 19 split illustrates how conservative critics of the mainstream media have it all wrong. The media—or at least the editorial boards at the country’s major newspapers—don’t suffer from liberal bias; they suffer from statism. While conservatives emphasize order and property, liberals emphasize equality, and libertarians emphasize individual rights, newspaper editorial boards are biased toward power and authority, automatically turning to politicians for solutions to every perceived problem.

Because the left traditionally has looked to government to enforce its preferences more than the right, and certainly more than libertarians, it’s easy to see how someone might get the impression that the news media lean left. But you see the editorial pages’ lust for authority on issues like campaign finance reform, where unlike left-leaning groups such as the ACLU and the Sierra Club they almost uniformly support restrictions on political speech, despite the fact that their profession is inextricably tied to the First Amendment. This deference to authority was also on display in the Kelo v. New London case, where the Washington Postand New York Times editorial boards jettisoned traditionally liberal principles such as equality and fair play in favor of a broad government power to forcibly transfer property from people of modest means to wealthy developers. That position separated those papers from traditionally progressive groups like the NAACP and the AARP, whichargued that eminent domain too often enriches developers at the expense of powerless groups.

But newspaper editors’ elevation of government power above other liberal concerns is clearest on criminal justice issues, where editorial boards’ deference to police powers aligns them with conservatives about as often as with liberals. To the extent that the criminal justice system treats minorities differently than it treats the white majority (which is a legitimate problem), you’ll find newspapers registering concern along with the left. But while liberals traditionally have sought to address this sort of problem by protecting individual rights, editorial boards tend to stop at expressing concern, generally opposing any reform that would put significant limits on government power.

Balko gets it half right. Yes, the media “suffers from statism.” But that makes perfect sense when one recognizes that the therapeutic state is a core component of the Totalitarian Humanist paradigm. As Dr. Szasz said, “In the nineteenth century, a liberal was a person who championed individual liberty in a context of laissez-faire economics, who defined liberty as the absence of coercion, and who regarded the state as an ever-present threat to personal freedom and responsibility. Today, a liberal is a person who champions social justice in a context of socialist economics, who defines liberty as access to the means for a good life, and who regards the state as a benevolent provider whose duty is to protect people from poverty, racism, sexism, illness, and drugs.”

The liberal media supports the drug war for the same reason they typically support gay marriage, affirmative action, expanding the welfare state, and nanny state laws ranging from mandatory use of seatbelts to smoking bans. All of these are perfectly consistent position from the totalitarian humanist ideological perspective.

This is encouraging:

For the last few months, my colleague Matt Welch has been tracking the positions of California’s newspapers on Proposition 19, the ballot measure that would legalize marijuana for recreational use. At last count, 26 of the state’s 30 largest dailies (plus USA Today) had run editorials on the issue, and all 26 (plus USA Today) were opposed. This puts the state’s papers at odds with nearly all of California’s left-leaning interest groups, including the Green Party, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Service Employees International Union, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

It is precisely these “dissident left” sectors-genuine eco-radicals, authentic black radicals, rank and file workers, sincere civil libertarians-that comprise the factions of the Left that we eventually need to bring into the Alternative-Anarchist/Pan-Secessionist paradigm. A breech between them and the Totalitarian Humanists works in our favor.

After 9/11, the fear of another attack on U.S. soil cleanly supplanted the fear of having one`s penis chopped off by a vengeful lover in the pantheon of irrational American fears.

While we`re constantly being told that another attack is imminent and that radical Islamic fundamentalists are two steps away from establishing a caliphate in Branson, Missouri, just how close are they? How do the odds of dying in a terrorist attack stack up against the odds of dying in other unfortunate situations?

The following ratios were compiled using data from 2004 National Safety Council Estimates, a report based on data from The National Center for Health Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau. In addition, 2003 mortality data from the Center for Disease Control was used.

— You are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack

— You are 12,571 times more likely to die from cancer than from a terrorist attack

— You are 11,000 times more likely to die in an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane

— You are 1048 times more likely to die from a car accident than from a terrorist attack

–You are 404 times more likely to die in a fall than from a terrorist attack

— You are 87 times more likely to drown than die in a terrorist attack

— You are 13 times more likely to die in a railway accident than from a terrorist attack

–You are 12 times more likely to die from accidental suffocation in bed than from a terrorist attack

–You are 9 times more likely to choke to death on your own vomit than die in a terrorist attack

–You are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist

–You are 8 times more likely to die from accidental electrocution than from a terrorist attack

— You are 6 times more likely to die from hot weather than from a terrorist attack

On six different occasions between 1984 and 1994, I cast a ballot in an American election, including five general elections and one primary. Of my five general election votes, four were for Democrats and one for a Libertarian. I’ve only voted for a Republican once, in the 1988 Super Tuesday primary. I voted for Bob Dole, not because I liked him, but because I wanted to vote against two other candidates. The philosophe in me was thrilled at the prospect of voting against the Rev. Pat Robertson, and I also wanted to vote against Reagan’s Vice-President George H.W. Bush.

The Republicans are primarily the party of the right-wing of the traditional plutocracy, the upper class, and the military-industrial complex, with the uber-Zionist neoconservatives serving as their intellectual and political leadership, and the no doubt typically sincere libertarians, conservatives, and populists who vote for them are their useful idiots. I’ve previously explained why that is here and here. The Democrats are primarily the party of the newer, more high-tech industries as opposed to the traditional plutocracy of oil, agriculture, manufacturing, and finance (although elite banking interests and the great corporations obviously have their hands in both parties). In particular, industries related to the mass media and entertainment are aligned with the Democrats. That is why the New York and Los Angeles areas are among the few localities where the wealthy vote typically goes Democratic. It is in these newer industries where the newly rich, and the so-called “bourgeois bohemians” can be found. These represent a new, rising force within the plutocracy, and one that is more culturally liberal than the traditional elite. Essentially, the present manifestation of the Democrat/Republican dichotomy represents a class struggle between the traditional upper class (comparable to the old European aristocracies) and a rising newly rich that is comparable to the rising bourgeoisie of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The new rich and the bourgeois bohemians represent the rising upper middle and new upper class in the industrial sector, with the New Class of professional and bureaucratic elites representing this rising upper middle class in the public sector. This is also a cultural struggle, as the rising upper middle class represents the values of the post-1960s culture, with the traditional elite and the more traditional middle to upper-middle class continuing to represent the pre-1960s culture. To some degree, this is also a racial and religious struggle, with the Democrats representing the elite members of traditional outgroups, and the upwardly mobile sectors of America’s traditional racial and religious minorities, and the Republicans continuing to represent the traditional WASP elites and the traditionally dominant WASP culture.

As readers of this blogsite are aware, the American Revolutionary Vanguard/Attack the System platform and strategy is based upon a number of predictions and presumptions. The first of these is that the traditional WASP elite will eventually be dethroned by the rising, multicultural, post-60s upper middle class who will then constitute the new plutocracy and have full control over the economy and the state. This rising new elite brings with it the ideology of totalitarian humanism, which I have explained here, here, here, and here, and here. This ideology of totalitarian humanism is the contemporary equivalent of the Jacobinism of the French revolutionaries or the Marxists of the twentieth century. As the great liberal-monarchist scholar Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn observed:

Marxism is absolutely bourgeois and therefore appeals strongly to the left-of-center, middle-class mind with its commercial background. Waldemar Gurian was very much to the point when he wrote, “Marxism, and therefore Russian Bolshevism, does but voice the secret and unavowed philosophy of bourgeois society when it regards society and economics as absolute. “…It was the late Ben Hecht who admonished his readers not to believe in the picture of the Communist as a man with a bomb in one hand and a dagger in another. To Hecht, bolshevism was a movement that evolved logically from nice middle-class democracy.

In other words, proponents of totalitarian ideologies are almost always alienated intellectuals, professionals, and educated persons from the left-wing of the middle class, whether they be Jacobins, Marxists, Fascists, Nazis, or Totalitarian Humanists. This rising upper middle class considers itself to be revolutionary in nature, as indicated by an ideologue of Totalitarian Humanism, Tim Wise, a self-proclaimed, self-styled, professional “anti-racist”:

And in the pantheon of American history, conservative old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame, the folks unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms.

Fine, keep it up. It doesn’t matter.

Because you’re on the endangered list.

And unlike, say, the bald eagle or some exotic species of muskrat, you are not worth saving.

In forty years or so, maybe fewer, there won’t be any more white people around who actually remember that Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, Opie-Taylor-Down-at-the-Fishing Hole cornpone bullshit that you hold so near and dear to your heart…

And by then you will have gone all in as a white nationalist movement — hell you’ve all but done that now — thus guaranteeing that the folks of color, and even a decent size minority of us white folks will be able to crush you, election after election, from the Presidency on down to the 8th grade student council…

Because those who have lived on the margins, who have been abused, maligned, targeted by austerity measures and budget cuts, subjected to racism, classism, sexism, straight supremacy and every other form of oppression always know more about their abusers than the abusers know about their victims.

Wise’s reference to “forty years” is particularly relevant because what he is referring to is the projected demographic transformation of the United States that is predicted to occur sometime around the year 2050. It is projected that at that point there will no longer be an ethnic majority in the United States. According to the utopian-universalist-Jacobin-Marxist beliefs of people like Tim Wise, everyone will then live happily ever after in a multicultural utopia administrated by enlightened New Class liberal elites like himself (or his ideological descendants) who will have a privileged existence in the manner of a Soviet apparatchik.

“Forty years” is also highly relevant to the ARV/ATS program. Last year, I published an essay titled “Forty Years in the Wilderness” where I projected a time frame for the advancement of our struggle and the achievement of victory. ARV/ATS differs from most other anarchist factions in that we conceive of the struggle not in terms of the proletariat versus the bourgeoisie on the model of nineteenth and early twentieth century radicalism or in terms of traditional outgroups versus traditional WASP culture on the model of late twentieth century radicalism. Instead, we identify Totalitarian Humanism as the primary enemy, recognizing that it’s defeat of the traditional WASP elite is inevitable, and recognizing that the anarchist struggle against Totalitarian Humanism is the twenty-first century equivalent of the historic rivalry between Anarchists and Communists, between Stirner, Proudhon, or Bakunin and Marx and Engels, between the rival wings of the First International, between the Bolsheviks and the Kronstadt rebels, between the Spanish anarchists and the Spanish Communist Party, between Rothbard and the neocons, between liberty and statism.

The ARV/ATS outlook calls for the creation of a radical elite committed to the metapolitical outlook of “anarcho-pluralism,” a synthesis of the varying schools of anarchism and informed by relevant ideas from other ideologies (paleoconservatism, European New Right, bioregionalism, distributism, black nationalism). The ARV/ATS program advances the meta-strategic concept of “pan-secessionism” as the means of ultimately destroying the emerging Totalitarian Humanist state. The ARV/ATS outlook recognizes ten core demographics, each of them with numerous subgroups, that will be the natural constituency for the resistance to Totalitarian Humanism.

So what does this have to do with Tuesday’s election? This ABC News exit poll identifies an “anger vote,” implicitly rooted in the demographic associated with the “Tea Party” movement. One of the ten core demographics is the so-called “populist right” element that presently identifies with the Tea Parties. The Tea Parties are a reactionary, not a revolutionary movement, but this sector has the potential to become revolutionary once it finally realizes that it has no chance of reclaiming the state for itself and as it becomes increasingly subject to state repression as Totalitarian Humanism becomes more deeply entrenched in institutions. It is significant that the mainstream media would identify these sectors as an “anger vote” because anger is the sentiment that fuels revolutions. The exit poll in question also identifies an “economy vote.” This sector will become increasingly large and significant in the future as economic decline and widening class divisions continue. It is also significant that the “economy vote” went for the Republicans. This is an indication that the economically frustrated are casting their lot against the political party most strongly identified with Totalitarian Humanism in the public mind. The “economy vote” is at present drawn primarily from the sinking middle class, which is another of the ten core demographics.

Others among the ten core demographics are the lumpenproletariat, traditional outgroups that are not included within the Left’s pantheon of the oppressed, and declasse sectors (persons of affluent origins or class positions who reject the values of their class). The various drug cultures are an obvious example of these. California’s Proposition 19 for the first time brought the drug decriminalization movement into the mainstream of American politics. Particularly significant is that the Obama administration, the most committed to Totalitarian Humanism of any regime in U.S. history, was openly hostile to Proposition 19, and Attorney General Eric Holder, himself a Totalitarian Humanist ideologue, threatened to disregard Proposition 19 in California if it were to pass.

Still others among the ten core demographics are racial minorities outside the liberal paradigm, the lower class members of the traditional outgroups, or members of the traditional outgroups who reject the values of Totalitarian Humanism. The ABC News exit poll indicates that the Republicans won the working class vote, the white Catholic vote, and roughly fifty percent of the women’s vote. As interesting as any other data from this election is the evidence of gains by black Republican candidates. What all of this indicates is that, as I have long predicted, the liberal coalition that forms the support base for the rising Totalitarian Humanist elite is unstable and is in the very early stages of showing its cracks.

None of this should be taken as an apology for the Republicans. The GOP represents the dying forces of a decrepit old bourgeoisie elite and a bankrupt empire. It is our task as revolutionaries not to side with the reactionaries of the GOP but to develop a movement that will eventually replace the Republicans as the primary competitors to the rising upper middle class and its totalitarian humanist ideology and state. Just as the Republican Party emerged through the collapses of the Whigs, and the synthesis of its more radical elements with a collection of fringe parties united by opposition to Southern secession, so is it our task to replace the Republican Party by absorbing its more radical populist elements and synthesizing these with others among the core demographics to be drawn from other sectors of American society, and unite these disparate elements under the banner of pan-secessionism.

The two comics evoked the phantom left, as the liberal class always does, in defense of moderation, which might better be described as apathy. If the right wing is crazy and if the left wing is crazy, the argument goes, then we moderates will be reasonable. We will be nice. Exxon and Goldman Sachs, along with predatory banks and the arms industry, may be ripping the guts out of the country, our rights—including habeas corpus—may have been revoked, but don’t get mad. Don’t be shrill. Don’t be like the crazies on the left.

“Why would you work with Marxists actively subverting our Constitution or racists and homophobes who see no one’s humanity but their own?” Stewart asked. “We hear every damn day about how fragile our country is—on the brink of catastrophe—torn by polarizing hate, and how it’s a shame that we can’t work together to get things done. But the truth is we do. We work together to get things done every damn day. The only place we don’t is here [in Washington] or on cable TV.”

Perhaps we Marxists are “undermining the Constitution.” I’m all for it. It’s not a holy document. It’s a racist treatise that divides American society into the have and have-nots. Even the rights we are granted are politically moderated. Attacking the injustices embedded in the Constitution is not an attack on the American people; it is an attack on the ruling class.

I refuse to buy into the American liberal notion of “bipartisanship”–that somehow “reaching across the aisle” is somehow better for everyone and is the only avenue to “change.”

Call me insane if you will, but the right wing is my enemy. I have no interest in working with them, or compromising away my rights for war funding.

The Democrats are not even the other side of the same coin. If the Republicans are the raised edges that cut into the skin of the working class, the Democrats are the pits that give the edges definition. It is not in my interest to murder my brothers and sisters in Afghanistan to continue the occupation of their country in order to pass the DREAM Act or to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell.” That is an unacceptable compromise.

A police-state is not necessarily a dictatorship. On the contrary, it can even take the form of a representative democracy. A police-state is not defined by its leadership structure, but rather, by its self-protection against the individual.

A definition of “fascism” is tougher to come by—it’s almost as tough to come up with as a definition of “pornography”.

The sloppy definition is simply totalitarianism of the Right, “communism” being the sloppy definition of totalitarianism of the Left. But that doesn’t help much.

For our purposes, I think we should use the syndicalist-corporatist definition as practiced by Mussolini: Society as a collection of corporate and union interests, where the state is one more competing interest among many, albeit the most powerful of them all, and thus as a virtue of its size and power, taking precedence over all other factions. In other words, society is a “street-gang” model that I discussed before. The individual has power only as derived from his belonging to a particular faction or group—individuals do not have inherent worth, value or standing.

This is a question I used to discuss with a history professor of mine who was a Civil War expert. He got his Phd from Berkeley in the 1970s and Eric Foner was on his dissertation committee so you can guess what his politics were (very Meatheadish). He always insisted there was no evidence that blacks actually fought on the Confederate side in the Civil War. His arguments were the same as the ones Levine uses in the Post article. I’d ask him about some of the evidence to contrary (like the stuff cited by Williams and some of the responders to Levine) and he would dismiss it as unreliable or fabricated. He could never effectively answer my questions like why black historians in early 20th century America would want to forge evidence of blacks having fought for the Confederacy.

My tentative conclusion on this question has long been that the Confederate Army had a kind of policy on this question equivalent to “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The official position of the Confederate political and military leadership does seem to have been to bar blacks from service. However, it’s also pretty well established that the policy was at least at times disregarded. There would seem to be two ways in which this might have occurred. One, local military commanders could have simply disregarded the policy when raising local forces out of military necessity. The other possibility is that the upper levels of Confederate leadership maintained an official policy of racial exclusion regarding military service as a means of avoiding public controversy, upholding the white supremacist ideological outlook that virtually all whites had in those days, and possibly avoiding unrest by white soldiers, but winked at military organizers and commanders who disregarded the policy in their actual practice (and possibly even encouraging them to do so).

That was my reaction to Jon Stewart’s “Rally Against Rallies” over the weekend. The best analysis of this I’ve seen yet is Jeremy Weiland’s:

But I’ll tell you what’s really absurd and embarrassing: critiquing our political culture because, in the midst of all the death, destruction, and suffering it’s causing around the world and at home, the big problem is that the rhetoric is too uncouth. The rhetoric! My poor, virgin ears! As if that’s the major problem with politics right now. Not innocent men, women, and children dying every day because of drone attacks by this supposedly calm and concerned President. Not peaceful people being jailed everyday for political crimes connected to what they choose to do with their body. Not the economic crimes committed by the corporate-government cabal destroying any wealth and future security. No, it’s the tone of national discourse we should really be concerned about.

A century-old ideological movement, Liberalism: once devoted to impossible causes like ending racism and inequality, empowering the powerless, fighting against militarism, and all that silly hippie shit—now it’s been reduced to besting the other side at one-liners…and to the Liberals’ credit, they’re clearly on top. Sure there are a lot of problems out there, a lot of pressing needs—but the main thing is, the Liberals don’t look nearly as stupid as the other guys do. And if you don’t know how important that is to this generation, then you won’t understand what’s so wrong and so deeply depressing about the Jon Stewart Rally to Restore Sanity.

Throughout the 9/11 years (2001-2006), the tragedy and farce of “movement conservatism,” I found myself agreeing with most of the Daily Show clips I came across in which Stewart would criticize the pompous “democracy spreaders” and their beloved “Decidor.” Certainly, no one else on mainstream cable was willing to report on then-candidate Barack Obama’s kowtow to AIPAC using a New York “Jewy” voice, as Stewart did in a now legendary segment, “Indecision 5768.”

But that was then — in 2007, an “extremist” conservative was in the White House and Barack Obama was a plucky underdog — and this is now — Democrats run the country and grassroots conservatism has taken up the mantle of social protest. Stewart’s message has thus modulated to lampooning those who are anti-Establishment and offering the soothing counsel oftake it easy, trust in your elected leaders, don’t question the system, in less subtle words, OBEY!

Preventing that was the purpose of the Rally for Self Satisfaction. With recycled propaganda from The Authoritarian Personality days, Leibowitz and Colbert casually denigrated people who are concerned about what is happening to their country as paranoid, ignorant, and insane. The truth is that as the debt exceeds GDP, as our urban centers turn into desolate wastelands, and as “our” government engages in openly hostile action against the core population, the remarkable fact is that there is so little reaction, and what reaction there is mostly channeled into politics as usual. Far from speaking truth to power, Stewart and Colbert are courtiers who mock what little resistance exists. The system has no breaks and as we plummet off the cliff, Stewart and Colbert insist that we laugh all the way.

For about a decade and a half, crime rates in the United States have generally fallen. That is the good news. The bad news is that even during those “good” years, the United States still had the most car thefts, the most rapes and the most murders in the world. And even though the United States has the most people in prison in the entire world by a large margin, there are all kinds of signs that there are still enough criminals out there for crime to start moving back up again. Sure, there are some areas that are still recording small decreases in the crime rate, but there are other areas where the jump in crime statistics is more than a bit alarming. There are millions of Americans that have been out of work for over a year at this point, and when people lose everything that they have they tend to totally lose it. People get desperate when they lose their homes and they don’t have anything to eat. For example, police in Chesterfield, Virginia are investigating 16 separate incidents just this month in which thieves stole food or drinks from homes, cars and even people walking on the street. It wasn’t money that these crooks were after.

They just wanted something to eat.

As the economy gets even worse over the next couple of years, it is inevitable that we are going to start to see a lot more of this kind of thing. Frustration and anger are on the rise from coast to coast, and when people don’t feel like they have anything to live for they become very dangerous.

As mentioned at the beginning of the article, it is undeniable that violent crime rates are significantly lower than they were 15 or 20 years ago in many areas of the nation. An unprecedented standard of living fueled by our addiction to debt has kept most Americans fat, happy and generally sedated. However, there are indications that we are approaching a “turning point” – a moment when crime rates start to go up significantly once again.

In fact, there are some forms of crime (such as sexual crime against children) that are already at ridiculously high record-setting levels. For example, how in the world did we ever get to the point as a society where we have 400,000 registered sex predators running around?

As the economy continues to unravel, things are not going to get any better. In fact, people who are suffering are only going to become more desperate. Already, there are quite a few troubling signs out there. The following are 12 crime statistics that make you wonder what is happening to America …

#1 The murder rate in New York City has increased more than 15 percent in 2010, and the number of rapes has shot up from 943 in 2009 to 1075 so far this year.

#2 In the city of Detroit, crime has gotten so bad and the citizens are so frustrated by the lack of police assistance that they have resorted to forming their own organizations to fight back. One group, known as “Detroit 300?, was formed after a 90-year-old woman on Detroit’s northwest side was brutally raped in August.

#3 Crime in Miami Beach was up almost 11 percent during the first half of 2010.

#4 The murder rate in Tempe, Arizona is now the highest it has been in 10 years.

#5 Shoplifting is completely and totally out of control. According to the National Association of Shoplifting Prevention, every single day Americans steal more than $35 million worth of goods from retail stores.

#6 Today, there are approximately 400,00 registered sex offenders in the United States.

#7 U.S. authorities claim that there are now over 1 million members of criminal gangs operating inside the United States. According to federal statistics, these 1 million gang members are responsible for up to 80% of the violent crimes committed in the U.S. each year.

#8 The median age of the victims of imprisoned sex offenders in the United States is 13 years old.

#9 The crime rate in the San Diego school system is escalating out of control. The following is what San Diego School Police Chief Don Braun recently told the press about the current situation…

#10 53 percent of all investigated burglaries in the states of California, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and Texas are perpetrated by illegal aliens.

#11 Law enforcement officials estimate that about 600,000 Americans and 65,000 Canadians are trading dirty child pictures online. They also say that the total profit from creating and trading these images is approximately two to three billion dollars every year.

#12 Each year, one out of every five people in the U.S. is victimized by crime. No other nation on the planet has a rate that is higher.

So will the police step in to protect us all as crime increases?

Well, unfortunately police forces all across the United States are being slashed because the money just isn’t there anymore.

So all of us may soon be facing much more crime with much fewer police to assist us.

For example, because of extreme budget cuts and police layoffs, Oakland, California Police Chief Anthony Batts has announced that there are a number of crimes that his department simply will no longer respond to due to a lack of resources. The following is a partial list of the crimes that police officers in Oakland will no longer be responding to….

burglary

theft

embezzlement

grand theft

grand theft: dog

identity theft

false information to peace officer

required to register as sex or arson offender

dump waste or offensive matter

loud music

possess forged notes

pass fictitious check

obtain money by false voucher

fraudulent use of access cards

stolen license plate

embezzlement by an employee

extortion

attempted extortion

false personification of other

injure telephone/power line

interfere with power line

unauthorized cable tv connection

vandalism

Not that Oakland wasn’t already a mess before all this, but now how long do you think it will be before total chaos and anarchy reigns on the streets of Oakland?

But this kind of thing is not just happening in Oakland.

The sheriff’s department in Ashtabula County, Ohio has been reduced from 112 deputies to 49 deputies, and now there is just one vehicle remaining to patrol all 720 square miles of the county.

So what in the world are the citizens of that county supposed to do to protect themselves?

Well, Judge Alfred Mackey said that the citizens of the county should do the following…

“Arm themselves.”

So is that where all of this is going?

Every man and woman for themselves?

The truth is that there are already many communities across the United States where it is simply not a good idea to go out of your home at night.

There has never been a bigger gang problem in U.S. history than we are facing today, there have never been more sex predators running around, and millions of Americans are going to become increasingly desperate as they lose their homes and can’t find jobs.

There’s much talk these days, particularly by the Tea Party types, about getting back to the “real” Constitution, forcing the Obama government to honor the “original intent” of the Founding Fathers, and “understanding the Constitution through the eyes of its creators,” as one contributor to the Tenth Amendment Center recently put it. That center, in fact, is dedicated to, and attracting a growing following for, a rigid interpretation of that amendment reserving to the states the powers not expressly given to the Federal government. And along with it in the last few years has grown up a Constitution Party that has the idea that the nation’s problems can be solved by “a renewed allegiance” to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and hence a return to “limited government.” The problem with current officials of both parties, as the CP see it, is that they “ignore their oaths to uphold the Constitution,” that is to say, the Constitution as originally written and used in the 18th century .

This would be a far different country, of course, if it paid an allegiance to the document of 1787 that the renegade Congress had come up with, in secret, that summer in Philadelphia, even along with its first ten amendments. But what all the critics who believe that going back to the original Constitution would forestall the kinds of forces that have led to the present bloated, overstretched, intrusive, and unwieldy government do not realize is that this is what it almost inevitably had to lead to.

Let’s wake up these “real Constitution” die-hards and the ardent “Tenthers” and tell them that it’s a waste of time to try to resurrect that document in order to save the nation —because because the growth of government and the centralization of power is inherent in its original provisions. As the anti-Federalists were trying to say all along from the very beginning of the ratification process. Only when we get people today off this understandable but ill-fated track can we begin to open their eyes to the reality of our present peril: we have a big overgrown government because that’s what the Founding Fathers founded, and we won’t escape from it until we take the idea of secession as seriously as it must be taken. Let’s look at some of the dangerous elements of the “real” Constitution.

It starts off with a phrase that, right there at the start, sounded alarm bells in those who, having experienced the powers of the individual states as sovereign states under the Articles of Confederation, saw that it was not to the states but to “we the people” that power would be given. “What right had they to say, We ,the people,” cried Patrick Henry to the Virginia ratification convention, “instead of, We, the states?” He saw that the phrase gave power to an amorphous “people” whom the new government could define and use as it chose, bypassing and undercutting the states. If “the people” spoke through the Congress, it could willy-nilly ignore the individual states.

Which, indeed, is what happened, and Congress was cheerfully ratified in doing so by another centralizing branch of government, the Supreme Court. But the idea was never more egregiously used than when Lincoln denied that the states had any particular power, indeed denied that they were sovereign entities at all, and argued that all power rests with the people, who had created a United States and wanted it united. “Government of the people,” in other words, means that Washington can do whatever it damn pleases in their name.

And the anti-Federalists had warned of exactly that seventy years before. The framers of the Constitution, said Luther Martin, a delegate to the convention from Maryland, were crypto-monarchists whose “wish it was to abolish and annihilate all State governments, and to bring forward one general government…of a monarchical nature, under certain restrictions and limitations.” That was said in November 1787—don’t say you weren’t warned. But let’s go on with the faults of the centralizers’ Constitution. There is in Article I a bold statement that “Congress shall have the power to” and there follow some specifics about taxes and debts—and then “provide for the… general welfare of the United States.” Agree to that and you’ve agreed it can do anything it likes without check or rein, for what measure could not be thought to be enhancing the “general welfare”? James Madison, who had a hand in Federal enlargement elsewhere in the document, saw the danger here: “If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of …in short, everything, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police.” That is not what they had fought a war against the British monarchy for. Not more than a few phrases away is the famous “commerce clause,” by which a Supreme Court, ever-willing to enhance the powers of the Washington establishment, managed almost from the beginning to enhance Congressional control over what the states would be allowed to do. Congress shall have the power, it reads, “to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states.” That would seem to mean that Congress could establish terms by which states could trade with each other, so that none would establish tariffs against any other—“a negative and preventive provision against injustice among the States themselves,” as Madison saw it, “rather than as a power to be used for the positive purposes of the General Government.”

But positive is what the clause became. The Supreme Court decided that practically anything that went on commercially within one state would have some kind of effect on all the others, in some way or other, and so government can regulate it; as early as 1828 it held that the government could regulate trade on the Hudson river for its entire length because some of it ran along New Jersey, and the monopoly New York state had given to Robert Fulton to run his steamboat it decided to be null and void because it affected New Jerseyans. Its reading of the clause became ever more expansive as time went on and by the New Deal it gave the government carte blanche to interfere in state business down to the level of a janitor’s salary and a farmer’s wheat crop.

And as if that wasn’t a sufficient interference in state business, the Founding Fathers wound up their Constitution with a clause that ringingly asserted that what they had just enumerated as the powers of the government—and any laws that they should subsequently pass “in pursuance thereof”—“shall be the supreme law of the land” and judges in the states better take that to heart. This “supremacy clause” was hotly debated at the time because it, like the other sections above, could be interpreted in such a broad way that the states would be powerless to act on matters of serious concern, and thus it was that when there finally came a slew of amendments that the people of the states demanded as checks on Federal power, one of the most important was the Tenth, asserting that Washington had only the specific powers enumerated in the Constitution and the states had jurisdiction in all else.

Which brings up the final deficiency in that Constitution, that Tenth Amendment itself. It seems clear that a great many serious people felt that when it said “the powers not delegated to the U.S….are reserved to the states…or to the people,” that this guaranteed a considerable sovereignty for the states. But the centralists agreed to it (and put it at the end of the Bill of Rights) because they knew that it was so unspecific, so merely rhetorical, that it was capable of any interpretation—and that a Supreme Court capable of giving itself judicial review over Congress ( not enumerated in the Constitution) would be capable of finding that the powers delegated to the U.S. were pretty vast and those given to the states were few and limited in scope. As it so happened.

The Tenthers are fighting valiantly to reverse the 220 years in which that last item in the Bill of Rights has been emasculated and rendered effectively irrelevant, and they may even be gaining some attention, particularly in the states’ growing resistance to Obamacare. But it seems most unlikely that, with the other centralizing tools at their command, the Federal courts will give it much consideration. And then when they finally see their beloved amendment in shreds, maybe then the Tenthers and other Constitutional-Firsters will begin to see that the U.S. Constitution, by the centralists, of the nationalists, and for the Hamiltonians, is not a document that will lead them to liberty and sovereignty. The only method for that, let us hope they finally realize, is secession.

Some of this stuff would seem to be a possible prototype for replacing the state’s social welfare system. Presumably, these models could be utilized by separatist or decentralist movements of any type.

Tonight, I had a conversation with a woman who has worked in a clerical capacity for the court system in three different jurisdictions in my state. She told me that during her time as a court employee she observed that if drug cases were eliminated from the court system altogether the criminal division of the courts would essentially be non-existent compared to what it is now. Hmmm.

Interesting talk by Bowden. I’m not that big on Evola, I prefer Nietzsche, but either way this is a great discussion of religion, philosophy, and society. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7.

It’s somewhat surprising to find an article like this in a relatively mainstream publication like the Guardian.

Yet it does not require that much thought to realise that people in different countries may have different views about what policies would be most appropriate for achieving economic growth or that attitudes towards certain human rights are quite socially and culturally specific. No one should ever be tortured, arbitrarily executed or held in slavery, but notions such as freedom of expression, religion and sexual relations do vary in different parts of the world. The right to private property is basically a western concept, which may be politically sensitive in societies where it is associated with capitalism and colonialism.